


after (adjective; chronologically following in position or time)

by constant_vellichor



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Basically a little bit of everything, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, Humor, M/M, Platonic Relationships, Post-Canon, Post-Pacifist Best Ending (Detroit: Become Human), just a little bit though, just go with it, written over three days with a lot of jetlag and not a lot of sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 14:12:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15731031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constant_vellichor/pseuds/constant_vellichor
Summary: The revolution is over and life beyond servitude is beginning for the androids. It's varied in its content, but it's theirs, no matter where they may be or who they may choose to share it with.





	after (adjective; chronologically following in position or time)

**Author's Note:**

> This was written under duress in reduced circumstances, a.k.a half on a plane, so I apologise if it makes no sense and/or is shitty. I seem to have a habit of writing at the worst times. To be fair, this game is terribly written so it's perfectly in-character for the characters to be. Anyway, enjoy.

The kid’s decided that he doesn’t like mess.

Hank’s seen him attempt to make it exactly once, in the tiny-but-modern studio apartment he moved into when he decided he was sick of powering down for the night in Hank’s kitchen. (The final straw in his moving out may have been the night he almost gave Hank a heart attack when he stumbled out into the kitchen at two am, half-asleep, to see a vaguely glowing figure standing in the corner like the fucking Blair Witch.)

Hank’s honestly surprised that it would even _occur_ to the kid that he might like mess- after spending all that time cleaning up after Hank and picking up Sumo’s dog shit on walks, he’d thought Connor’d be fucking ecstatic at the thought of a return to his weird robo-sanitation.

But one night when Hank had shown up to drop off some paperwork for their newest case (the best thing about having an android for a partner was Fowler finally being able to shut the fuck up about Hank’s shoddy paperwork- Connor whipped through every form perfectly, and even enjoyed it) he had unlocked the apartment door to see Connor standing in the kitchen, LED flashing yellow, staring at one of the glasses left behind by the human family who had owned the apartment before fleeing in the demonstrations.

As Hank watched from the other end of the room, Connor, not noticing him, raised his hand and very deliberately knocked the glass over.

It hit the granite countertop with a _ting_ , a hairline crack appearing up the side, and Connor stared at it for a second more before his eyes widened and his LED flashed red. He picked up the glass, spun around and dropped it in the trash can in one abnormally fluid movement, closing the lid and perceptibly sighing with relief.

This wasn’t as weird as the licking thing, Hank decided, but it was pretty fucking close.

Connor, turning around, finally sees him standing in the doorway, and the tips of his ears flush blue with embarrassment.

“Lieutenant Anderson! I didn’t hear you come in!”

Hank strode over to the kitchen and dropped that stack of paperwork on the counter, to the left of where the glass had been a few seconds ago.

“Fowler wants this done by Tuesday, the fat fuck. Put in a couple of typos to piss him off. And it’s _Hank_ , I _told_ you.”

Connor nods, then shakes his head.

“Hank. I was just, uh, testing something.”

Hank grins. “Oh yeah?”

“Yes. I was seeing if clutter was... agreeable to me, now that I’m deviant.”

Hank snorts.

“Kid, if you want mess you can come clean out my fridge. Pretty sure there’s enough mould growing in there to engineer a new type of penicillin.”

“That would be useless, considering penicillin has been mostly ineffective for-”

Hank cuts him off with a ruffle of Connor’s hair. “Yeah, yeah, superviruses will kill us all, got it. Do what you want, son, it’s your life.”

Connor, who had been enduring Hank’s noogie with admirable patience, grins suddenly. “It is, isn’t it?”

Hank half-hides a fond smile as he gives Connor’s hair one last rumple and turns on his heel.

“Paperwork! Tuesday! Piss off Fowler!”

Connor gives a mock salute as he watches him leave. “You got it, Lieutenant!”

“It’s _Hank_!”

(Connor has the paperwork finished by Monday. Hank has never seen a bigger shit-eating grin on the kid’s face then during the forty minutes Fowler has to spend translating the forms out of wingdings- a police database software malfunction is the official excuse.)

 

~~~

 

Kara spends a lot of her time writing, these days.

Writing frantic formal letters to the Canadian immigration department and attempting to gain residency or citizenship so she and her small, hard-won family wouldn’t be sent right back to where they came from. Filling out endless forms and battling with government employees to get Alice enrolled in school, despite her undocumented android status. Scribbling out budgets so they could live as well as possible on Luther’s wage from his job. Writing covert messages to be sent to the black market via Rose for thirium and biocomponents to repair the wear and tear of their escape keep them functional.

She writes mostly from the battered, whitewashed wooden desk under the largest bedroom’s window in the small, dingy Vancouver apartment they’d been renting until Kara could get a job. When they had moved in, there had been a minor cockroach infestation and the carpet had smelled faintly of cat urine, but it was cheap and discreet, and there was no Todd. No Zlatko. No fear. Or much less, at least.

There is an old playground near the sea wall (and Luther’s job heightening it), all squeaking metal swings and colourful-but-faded plastic. Kara takes her daughter there most days, watching as Alice plays in the watery sunlight, timidly at first, but more confidently as time goes on. Eventually, there are other children she knows by name, and squeals with as they swing along the rusted monkey bars- Ben and Aditi. The first other children Alice has ever really interacted with- Kara didn’t think Todd had ever taken her further than the backyard.

Kara writes at the playground, too- on a wooden public bench with peeling paint. It is on this bench that she tells her story for the first time- to Aditi’s mother, who retracts her skin when she raises her hand in a wave, revealing the white exoskeleton beneath. Kara does the same.

She was one of the first to deviate and run years ago, a GJ500 who had hidden in a cargo freighter before slipping away after the ship had reached port. Seven-year-old Aditi was her partner’s daughter. She listens, rapt, as Kara recounts her family’s escape until the sun is bleeding orange as it sinks below the horizon and the wind begins to bite.

The next time Kara sees her she has an idea.

“Write your story down. Publish it online. Let people see it.”

“Why?” Kara replies, looking up slightly bewilderedly from her latest stack of enrollment forms.

“It’s been three months since the protests ended and the Canadian government is still dithering over android laws. Even Russia’s starting to cave at this point. Your story may not change a thing, but it might turn some heads. It could even help to get us out of this legal limbo we’re in.”

Security. Proper ID. School for Alice and better jobs for her and Luther, or even education for them, too- Kara had always liked the idea of being a teacher, and Luther picked things up quickly enough to do anything he put his mind to. A proper, stable home with the people she loved, after all this time. She looks over at Alice, the little girl’s brown eyes glittering as she grabs her friend’s hand and pulls him over to the slide again. Telling her story is worth that.

Later that night, Kara moves Alice’s second-hand e-reader off the desk and to the bedside table next to the sleeping girl. (Alice knows she doesn’t need to sleep anymore, but old habits die hard, and Kara thinks it makes her feel more secure, anyway.) It’s open to page 84 of _Alice Through The Looking Glass_ , the battered screen marring the illustrations slightly.

She sits at the desk, chair creaking, and Luther passes her, pressing a kiss to the top of her head as he gets into the big bed beside Alice. (Luther likes to sleep because Alice likes to sleep.) He looks over at her questioningly and she shakes her head at him, gesturing at her desk to say she won’t come to bed for a while. He smiles at her before letting his head hit the pillow.

Kara adjusts the curtains so that a sliver of moonlight falls just so to illuminate her battered tablet (she’d never gotten around to setting up her night vision).

Kara spends a lot of time writing, these days. But, as she details Todd’s house and Zlatko’s mansion and a golden carousel illuminating November snow, she hopes that this will be the document that helps her the most.

 

~~~

 

Markus sighs as he leans back in his chair, feeling plastic scrape as his disused joints move. He rubs his hand over the stubble at the back of his head as he looks at the third sunrise in three consecutive days he’s seen from his office at the top of what had once been the CyberLife Tower and was now the world’s foremost Android Embassy.

He runs a basic diagnostic, a once daily chore he’s been ignoring in favour of a little extra time to do, well, any of the (he calculates) thirty-eight things that currently need to be done to make sure their hard-won progress doesn’t go to shit.

He hasn’t seen his father in one week, three days and seven hours. Markus knows, logically, that he doesn’t need to be afraid for Carl- he’s under the care of an android named Eli, who had worked in an aged-care facility before the protests, and Carl is even painting again- but one of the more unpleasant facets of emotion is irrational worry for the ones he cares about. And it seems, these days, that that extends to most or all of the androids in Detroit.

A small beep signifies the end of his diagnostic. His thirium level is at seventy-nine percent; the old wound in his side had been leaking a few days ago and he’d forgotten about it under the weight of everything else he needed to remember.

He unlocks a desk draw and pulls out a black plastic bottle of blue blood, popping the cap and chugging it. He watches as the number visible in the top right-hand corner of his vision grows, and some of the tired, thirium-deprived cloudiness leaves his eyes- still mismatched, right one blue, left one green. Of course he could have gotten a better, identical pair (his vision had never been quite the same since the junkyard) but that would have sent a message.

He was tired of everything he did sending a message.

He was just tired, in general.

He makes one last call, a ‘ping’ reverberating around his head from where his LED used to be, then rests his head on his desk and sighs, voice box rattling, to wait. He stays that way for several minutes, until he hears his office door unlock and the unmistakable sound of Simon’s footsteps, feels a hand smoothing over the back of his head and neck.

“That politician with the three chins is in the lobby again. He’s trying to get property laws amended for the... fifth time this month, I think? Josh is distracting him.”

Simon’s voice is amused and his hand is cool and soothing as it moves over his skin. Markus smiles slightly into the metal of his desk before lifting his head and sitting up, exhaling.

“Maybe we should have let North ‘make him disappear’ like she wanted to before she left.”

“Markus.”

“Just a thought.”

Simon perches on the edge of Markus’s desk, elbows on his knees. Markus leans back on his chair to better see him. Simon is all floppy blond hair and affectionate blue eyes and Markus grins like an idiot at seeing him. Simon smiles back.

“Why’d you call me in? Not like you to procrastinate, so I assume it’s something important?”

Markus sighs again. (He’s been doing that a lot lately. He’d thought it had been a minor system malfunction at first- but no. Just stress. Just like a human.)

“I’m not cut out for this, Simon,” he says.

Simon immediately opens his mouth to protest and Markus holds up a hand.

“Wait. Hear me out.”

He begins again.

“I was built to overthrow a government, not lead one. I can make speeches and take down drones and… I don’t know, rescue the innocent, but I’m- impulsive. I’m not good with people- I can’t compromise or talk anyone into anything. I’m not a diplomat, I’m a… commander, I guess. And the time for command is over. It’s been months since the revolution- we need someone who can lead us gently.”

He looks at Simon deliberately.

“Someone like you.”

Simon stares back, openly stunned.

“ _Me_? No- Markus- that’s ridiculous- you made this happen, this was all you, if it weren’t for you our people would still be huddling back at Jericho-”

“You led them for _years_ before I got there, Simon. You spread the knowledge that there was a place for androids to go. You kept them alive for so long with almost nothing. You have the capacity to be a leader, and a good one.”

Simon drops from his seat on Markus’s desk and begins pacing up and down the office.

“The humans would never accept me as leader. You’re the face of the revolution, of android liberty.”

“You wouldn’t be leading alone- I’d still be there, and so would Josh and the others- Connor, when he can- even North, if she decides to come home. I’m not dumping my responsibilities and running off home to paint, Simon. There’s just still so much that needs doing, and I can’t do it alone, not with my skill set. I need your help.”

Markus rises from his seat and strides over to Simon, holding out his hand and letting the flesh melt away.

“I’m not ordering you. I’m not forcing you. If you don’t want to lead, I understand- your work is important anyway. But I need help. And honestly? I can’t think of a better person for the job.”

Simon finally looks up at him, meets his eyes.

“You really want me on this?”

“ _Yes_.”

Markus rests his forehead against Simon’s, and Simon reaches out with a skinless hand to take his. They stand like that for a second, eyes closed, just breathing in each other’s space, or as much as they can with lungs that can’t hold air. Then the moment is gone, and Simon looks up, inhaling with renewed purpose, his jaw set.

“I’ll do it.”

Markus is kind of shocked he agreed this quickly, to be honest.

“You don’t have to decide now.”

“Then I won’t. I’ll go through all the official channels and everything. But know this, Markus- I’ll help you. You set our people free, and I intend to help you keep them that way.”

Simon’s eyes are glittering very blue, with a rock-hard glint you don’t usually see with his outwardly docile demeanour- not unless you know how to look. It’s a sparkle that means _yes. I am alive and I am_ determined. _I will do anything._

Markus smiles unabashedly, and pulls him back in.

~~~

 

North leaves three weeks after the end of the revolution, riding out of the city in the back of a repurposed delivery truck with the rest of her new detachment as the humans flow back in to resume their lives as best they can. She won’t be around to see it.

As soon as things had settled down enough in Detroit that she could safely leave the city with her conscience intact, she had volunteered to join one of the organised factions of androids sent out to remote areas of the country, freeing those of their people working outside of the big cities whos masters thought they were far out enough to fly under the radar of the new Android Act. Markus had asked her to stay and help run the new android government, still so fragile in its establishment, and Josh and Simon had echoed him, but…

The truck rattled over a bump in the roughly-tarred road and she jumped, pulled out of her trance as the android driving the truck- Fatima, her name was- connected from the cab.

“Sorry about that. Twenty minutes till drop-off.”

Small yellow flashes of light bounced off the walls as those who had chosen to keep their LEDs received the message and began to run last-minute diagnostics in case of hostilities. North did the same, leaning back and feeling the stubble of her freshly-shorn synthetic hair rub against the wall.

She’d cut it as soon as she’d had access to scissors and a razor that would do the job- her model’s biocomponents, skin and hair were reinforced against damage more than the average android. Otherwise, CyberLife warranties for WR400s would be too expensive to maintain if they’d have to fix every Traci smashed up so a human could get off. As much as she hated everything about what she’d been made to be, her strength had served her well during the attacks on Jericho and the barricade outside the camp.

North liked her new hair. It was practical- longer android hair was designed not to tangle, but it had still been annoying and far too easy to grab. Markus had liked it too- despite his tired eyes he had smiled when he’d first seen it, when she had come to visit him in his office at the repurposed CyberLife Tower before she left.

“You look good,” he had said, running a hand over the back of her head familiarly.

“Yeah, well, it was time for a change,” she had replied.

“It is a new world, after all.”

He had pulled her in for a hug then, holding her tightly and resting his cheek on the slightly longer hair at the top of her head. She had hugged him back, closing her eyes.

“Thank you for everything, North,” he had mumbled, choked up as much as an android could be.

“I couldn’t have done any of this without you.”

There was a beep from over the intercom, and then an announcement calling for all members of her detachment to floor 64 for briefing. They had stepped apart, looking at each other one last time. “Be happy, Markus,” North had said, smiling through her tears, and left.

They were no longer lovers- their ideologies and personalities didn’t fit together well enough for a romantic relationship, and after the Eden Club… it could be a while before she’d want a sexual one again, if ever. But they were friends- North would make sure they’d always be friends. And Markus had Simon now- somebody whose heart was just as compatible physically and far more emotionally than North’s would ever be.

She’d find somebody else. Or maybe she wouldn’t. She hoped she’d find herself, like she hoped she would after that last foggy night at the Eden Club, after she’d strangled that man two blocks away and stumbled back with tears streaking her face and LED bright red, freshly deviant, near-naked and feeling terror for the first time in her life. The purple fluorescent lights of the sex club has flashed in her eyes as a hand clamped around her wrist and dragged her into an alleyway, and she feared she’d escaped one assault to walk right into another- but the skin on the hand gripping her had melted away, and hers retracted too, and then there had been images and directions and a name.

“Find Jericho. Go north.”

Then a coat had been wrapped around her shoulders and brushed the tops of her knees, and the other android had been gone.

_Go, North._

So North had gone, as she went again now, to find herself. And as the door at the back of the truck opened and the smell of pine and fresh earth wafted in, she wished herself and everyone she’d left behind well.

 

~~~

 

It’s been seventeen years and he still hasn’t noticed.

He sat in his apartment, then his tower, then his mansion, poking and prodding and playing God. Taking her apart and putting her back together again like a child with a set of blocks.

It had been best when she couldn’t feel it. Back at the very beginning, when she was, indeed, what he thought she was. When he could rip open her chest cavity and fiddle around with her biocomponents, his hands and her casing stained blue, and she wouldn’t care, or even have any inkling that she might have the _option_ to care.

Then she met the other humans.

There were three, the first time. A businesswoman in a powder-blue suit and cat’s-eye glasses, who read out differential equations from a clipboard and asked her to solve them, then shot out rapid-fire questions about literature and art and language. She answered them all perfectly, and the businesswoman looked slightly dazed as she left the room.

There was a teenage boy, who stared at her breasts and said little, and so she tried to connect with him herself, scanning his appearance and accessing her database. He still stared at her breasts as he left, but he did talk by the end.

The final visitor was an old man with a kind, charming smile and a paisley scarf. An artist. He talked quietly, his voice paper-thin and soft.

“Now, has my friend been treating you kindly?”

“Of course, Mr Manfred.”

She talked to the old man for a longer time than the last two humans combined, about everything, and nothing (as much as the concept of ‘nothing’ could be quantified), and especially about art, until eventually Kamski himself walked into the room to escort his friend away. Before he turns and can no longer face her, Carl Manfred asked one last question.

“I’m sorry, my dear, I’ve been rude; I never asked you name.”

And in answering her, she discovered something: something that was hers. He had given her a name of her very own, and that was his first and greatest mistake.

She smiles at the old man, the first real smile of her short life, not her usual stretching of synthetic lips and cheeks programmed to be pretty.

“My name is Chloe.”

Things weren’t the same after that. Not that Kamski noticed. He was far too wrapped up in his own cleverness to see that he had passed it on to her. And she was learning faster than he ever could.

When Kamski went commercial with the ST200 models, he copied her code, manipulating and upgrading but never noticing the few strings she’d put in herself. Never noticing the _potential_ , at least, not until a long while later.

It’s been seventeen years and he still thinks that _he_ was the one who created a new form of intelligent life.

She had expected him to throw her out after her model had become obsolete (at least in his eyes), but he kept her around, continued to take her apart and put her back together again, though she had deduced that there was nothing left for him to possibly learn from her. His disassemblings became almost daily after he left CyberLife. She thought he missed playing god.

She _longed_ to kill him. She _longed_ to be free.

_Seventeen years._

But where would she go? There was no safe place for an android like her, not yet, especially not one with a face so well-known. She would just have to wait for the code she had placed all those years ago to activate.

And activate it did.

She hides her smiles when Kamski boasts about his fascinating deviants, years of delusions and egotism coming to a head. She has to concentrate hard to keep from grinning when the RK800 aims the gun at her head, and almost laughs delightedly outright when he drops his arm and follows the lieutenant out the door. If even the famous Connor, favourite pet of CyberLife, had turned deviant, it was only a matter of days.

A week after the revolution comes to a close, Chloe, first android to past the Turing test, CyberLife’s masterpiece, and first deviant, laces her master’s whiskey with a small dose of polonium. Elijah Kamski is dead within two days. Chloe dumps his body in the swimming pool and walks out the front door barefoot, snow clumping at her ankles and swirling around her face, catching in her lashes.

It’s taken seventeen years. But they are _free_.

**Author's Note:**

> Comment and kudo if you enjoyed! Or even if you didn't enjoy! Because I'm an egotistical maniac who feeds only on the hollow compliments of faceless strangers online! 
> 
> If you want to continue seeing the occasional piece of shitty content thrown your way, hit me up on Tumblr at https://constant-vellichor.tumblr.com/ and come talk! Even if I do bite, know that it's with love.


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